Essay: The Mind in the Machine

The factory robot that crushed a man to death in Japan last year did
little to silence the talk that machines are a threat to human
preeminence. That talk has been alive ever since people first
discovered that they could manufacture tools vastly superior to
themselves; in Samuel Butler's satire Erewhon (1872), the citizens
establish a museum of old machines in which they at once deposit and
abandon their mechanical inventions, which they believed would swallow
up their souls. When machines possess artificial intelligence, like
computers, the human fear of being overtaken seems...